Real Nonprofit Apps: Greg Saved $7500 in Printing Costs

The Ohio Music Educator’s Association State Convention welcomes 10,000 people: participants, performers, sponsors and attendees.

“We’ve been using Guidebook for three years, and this was our biggest year yet,” says Greg Taylor, the Technology Director for OMEA. “The Facebook page was lighting up with comments about the app.”

Busy schedule, lots of details? No problem.

The OMEA agenda has over 300 sessions, and each session might need to link to 5 clinicians, documents with song lists, and composer information. It’s not possible to have this information presented in an accessible way on a printed program, but Greg can include it in the mobile app using the easy-to-use data import tool.

“Visitors love that they can build their own schedules,” says Greg. “They can search for relevant sessions, make to-do lists, and check it off when it’s done… things you just can’t do with a paper program.”

Session feedback in real-time

“We found that over the years the written session feedback wasn’t effective,” says Greg. “Now that we use the Guidebook feedback tool, we’ve seen a huge volume increase in responses, and because it’s given in real-time, we trust its accuracy more.”

Nonprofit app costs were covered 100%

Guidebook offers a discount to qualifying nonprofits, and Greg was able to cover the remaining costs by selling in-app sponsorships. “We sold banner ads to our sponsors, and they loved that the app could dynamically link to their websites or offer pages.”

In-app sponsor banners, packaged along with other sponsorship opportunities, can usually cover app costs and go beyond that to generate revenue. Check out our post on how the experts package sponsor offers to keep their events fresh.

OMEA helped spread the word

Visitors from other regions loved the app, and Guidebook now provides nonprofit app support to numerous other music education conferences, trips and more.

Your nonprofit could qualify. Build an app for free to get started.